Staying hip with Tony Curtis

There's a cycle of films from Hollywood in the 1960s that I like to call for lack of a better term "generation gap movies" because they have the feel of old Hollywood trying to keep up with the times and not being particularly good at so doing. Another example of this is one that was on my DVR: Don't Make Waves, early tomorrow (March 31) morning at 4:15 AM as part of a night of movies saluting actress Claudia Cardinale, who died in September 2025.

Cardinale is the nominal female lead here, but this is Tony Curtis' movie all the way. He plays Carlo Cofield, a New Yorker who's vacationing in California when his car gets hit by Laura Califatti (that's Claudia Cardinale, as if you couldn't tell from the Italian accent). Laura decides to make it up to Carlo by putting him up at her house for the night; the question of what's going to happen to his car seems to be one of many plot holes not answered in the movie. More importantly, however, is the fact that this isn't quite Laura's house; instead, it's being funded by swimming pool manufacturer Rod Prescott (Robert Webber). Laura is Rod's mistress; he claims that his wife is an invalid which is why he can't get a divorce. In any case, Rod isn't happy to see Carlo.

Carlo gets an idea when he meets Rod, which is to stay out west and get a job selling pools for Rod's company, having learned that the company is trying to use Jim Backus (in a cameo role) for publicity. Before getting to see Rod again, however, Carlo is on the beach, which is one of those muscle beach types where bodybuilder Harry (David Draper) lives with his girlfriend, skydiver Malibu (Sharon Tate). Carlo falls for Malibu, which is a problem considering she's in a relationship with a big guy. There's also the issue of Laura falling for Carlo.

Further complicating matters is that when Carlo goes to see Rod, who should show up at Rod's office but... Diane Prescott (Joanna Barnes)? She's Rod's wife, and decidedly not an invalid. She also knows quite a bit about what's going on with Rod and Laura. Carlo, being a good publicity guy, is able to leverage all of this into a job for the swimming pool company. And then, to try to keep Malibu, he comes up with a way to have her sky dive into one of the company's swimming pools, although that stunt doesn't quite go off without a hitch. He also goes to see an astrologer whose column Harry reads, "Madame" Lavinia (Edgar Bergen; yes, his character is using a pseudonym), to drive a wedge between Harry and Malibu.

Eventually, everything winds up for the finale when all of the main characters meet at Carlo's beach house. They are, however, threatened with disaster when the monsoon season hits and the rainstorm begins to chip away at the land under Carlo's house....

Apparently Don't Make Waves is based on a book that was published in the late 1950s. Had the movie been made when the book came out, it might have felt fresh. By 1967, however, it feels tired and not particularly funny. The humor feels forced, and Carlo is such a dishonest schemer in the Jack Carson mode that his character isn't particularly likeable. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.

George C. Scott does one of those edgy 60s comedies

The 1960s saw Hollywood make a lot of comedies dealing more or less with sexual mores. Some of them seemed to be trying to appeal to the younger generation with the inclusion of new young names, while others just seemed to be established actors making something that felt new to Hollywood. An example of the latter, to me, would be Not With My Wife, You Dont!.

The movie starts off with the sort of animated sequence you might think of in a subversive Frank Tashlin movie of the 1950s, with the green-eyed monster of jealousy introducing various forms of animal jealousy, until the scene shifts to the main action of the story. Tom Ferris (Tony Curtis) is a colonel in the United States Air Force, currently serving as adjutant to General Parker (Carroll O'Connor). Parker is coming to London for a conference, and it's Col. Ferris' job to do all the advance legwork. At the meeting at the US Embassy, whom does Col. Ferris see but Col. Tank Martin (George C. Scott). It turns out that the two had a past together. And then that night at the ball for all the bigwigs, Col. Ferris and his wife Julietta (Virna Lisi) kind of get into it, which isn't exactly the best thing. But it turns out that Martin's presence is part of what's wrong.

This gives us the obligatory flashback, which tells us how Col. Ferris met Julietta quite a few years back in Korea. Julietta was serving as a nurse for the Italian Army, and she, Ferris, and Martin all meet together one night at the base watering hole, where the two men compete for the affections of Julietta since she's so pretty. Eventually, there's a big fight between the Americans and some Australians, and it's Ferris who winds up with Julietta. This extends to when Ferris is shot down and winds up in hospital where Julietta, being a nurse, tends to him, while Ferris tries to keep Martin from seeing her. Apparently their friendly rivalry is no holds barred. It extends to Ferris lying to her when Martin gets shot down as well and is at first presumed lost; Ferris destroys the telex revealing that Martin is in fact alive so that Julietta won't find out.

With that in mind, Martin sets about pursuing Julietta again once she sees that he hasn't died. And she might seem a bit receptive, in part because Ferris seems much more focused on his career than on his marriage. He's got a little black book that he uses to keep all the information on just what Gen. Parker wants, and there doesn't seem to be anything in it for a woman like his wife. So Martin convinces Gen. Parker to have Ferris transferred to "survival training" in Labrador, giving Martin a chance to start putting the moves on Julietta. Ferris discovers the ruse, but is he going to be able to get back to Julietta in time?

To be honest, this wasn't my favorite movie. The more I see 1960s comedies, the more I'm finding that there's a lot here that's not my favorite genre as a whole. A lot of them feel like they haven't aged very well. I've kind of talked about that regarding what I've referred to as the "generation gap" movie, which is the sort of movie I had in mind when I mentioned the movies movies with new stars in the introduction to this post. The cast here all try, and I think they do the best they can with the material they're given. But the material isn't the best. It's not anywhere near as bad as some of the comedies of this era (see Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding for one particularly dire example). But it's certainly not one of my favorites.

Insignificance

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars back in 2024 was Tony Curtis, and among the films of his that I hadn't seen before TCM ran them was one from later in Curtis' career called Insignificance. The synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it in order to watch and write up a review here.

It's sometime in the early 1950s, in New York City, and it looks for all the world like the famous subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch is being filmed. Except that none of the characters are actually given names so the actress who looks like it's supposed to be Marilyn Monroe is just The Actress, played by Theresa Russell. After shooting wraps for the day, her taxi driver is supposed to take her back to her hotel. But she has him stop at a newsstand and then, wanting to get away from everybody, she goes to a different hotel.

In that hotel is a Professor (Michael Emil), who looks a lot like Albert Einstein and is clearly working on some sort of advanced physics as he's got a ton of papers around him. Einstein, like this professor, was open about the idea that using nuclear as a weapon was something with which he was uncomfortable. As a result, after the Americans won World War II and then Soviet spies got the knowledge to make their own atomic weapons, some in high political office considered the atomic scientists politically suspect. Tony Curtis plays The Senator, based obviously on Joseph McCarthy, and he shows up at the Professor's hotel room trying to get the Professor to testify in front of the Senate committee, which the Professor doesn't wish to do.

And then The Actress knocks on the Professor's door. Each of them is happy to be in the presence of a kindred soul, and each of them seems to be intellectually curious, so they start talking about each other's lives, with the Actress describing how she understands the theory of relativity. The Professor, having a full suite and not just a single room, is willing to let The Actress crash for the night as well since she clearly wants to get out of the limelight for the evening.

Complicating matters is that the Actress is in the middle of a marriage that isn't going well, to a prominent baseball player (Gary Busey). This is an obvious reference to Joe DiMaggio. It's posited that one of the reasons that the marriage isn't going well is that the Actress is unable to carry a pregancy to term, and as the movie reaches its climax, such as the climax is, it seems as though she's currently pregnant but about to suffer a miscarriage from all the stress she's going through in her life. Or this could just be an illusion on her part, as the movie plays with time and has characters go through flashbacks and have thoughts about the future.

It's the way the movie goes back and forth in time that makes Insignificance a tough picture to get into. That, and the fact that for me the movie feels a bit like Boomerporn, or at least the sort of personalities that the first half of the Baby Boom generation would be thought to have as cultural touchstones are the subject here, thirty years removed from when the movie is set. I've stated before that I'm not the biggest fan of movies that take a doe-eyed look back at that era, and Insignificance has a decided visual look of artificially trying to recreate the early 1950s. So Insignificance is definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody.

Tony Curtis in Merry Olde England

Another person who was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars is Tony Curtis. TCM showed a couple of hs movies that I hadn't seen before, or even heard of. First up is a period action movie from fairly early in his career: The Black Shield of Falworth.

The movie is set in the reign of English King Henry IV (played by Ian Keith showing up briefly toward the end), so around the beginning of the 15th century. The Earl of Alban (David Farrar) is traveling through the countryside with his retinue, and stops at a farm in search of water. The farmhouse is owned by Bowman (Rhys Williams), who is guardian to siblings Myles (Tony Curtis) and Meg (Barbara Rush). Alban and his men see a pretty young woman, so of course they think they can have her, which ticks off poor Myles. Myles fights back, which is a dangerous thing to do, so the three of them are forced to leave.

At the local church, the friar informs then that Myles' late father left a signet ring with a heraldic shield on it, as well as a letter of introduction to the Earl of Mackworth (Herbert Marshall) stating that this is the son of Falworth. Apparently, the elder Falworth did something than him afoul of the monarchy, with the punishment that that Falworth shield be stricken from the heraldic record and that the entire Falworth family be wiped from the face of the earth, which is why Myles and Meg are in danger. Mackworth is, however, a friend, and puts Myles and Meg into service: Myles as a squire, and Meg as a servant to Lady Anne (Janet Leigh).

Myles immediately proceeds to be a truculent little bastard, rebelling just for the sake of rebellion while trying to find out the truth about the shield on the ring. He also meets Anne and immediately falls for her, which is a problem since the two are, as far as everybody knows, not of the same social class. She's also going to be betrothed to Walter Blunt (Patrick O'Neal), who is at this point head squire and not yet knighted. Anne eventually falls in love with Myles as well. But all of this is buildup to the climax.

It's really the Earl of Alban who has been plotting against King Henry. When Henry plans to visit Mackworth Castle, part of the festivities require jousting against Henry's companion, a count from Burgundy. Mackworth names Myles, but only someone who's been knighted and joust against a count. Alban recognizes the Falworth shield and demands that Myles should be killed. Henry gives Myles the chance to save himself in trial by combat against Alban. Alban, however, has an even more devious trick up his sleeve, which is to have Henry killed while observing the trial by combat.

Henry IV was a real person, but most of the rest of the dramatis personæ in The Black Sheild of Falworth are wholly fictional. Universal conceived this as an action movie in color and widescreen as an attempt to get people to shut off their TVs and come back to the theaters. So while the movie is short of plot, it's another movie that's more than entertaining enough. This, even if Tony Curtis doesn't exactly personify late medieval England; this is the movie about which the legend of Curtis saying "Yonder lies the castle of my fodder" sprung, although Curtis doesn't say anything like that.

So The Black Shield of Falworth certainly isn't great, and it's easy to see why this isn't one of Tony Curtis' most remembered movies. Much better was still to come for Curtis in his career.

The Rat Race (1960)

TCM's Summer Under the Stars for 2024 concludes with a day of the films of Tony Curtis. The day includes a film or two that I haven't seen before and so am intending to record. However, there's a movie of his that's on my DVR but isn't airing today, so that's the movie I'm blogging about for today: The Rat Race.

Curtis plays Pete Hammond Jr. As the movie opens, Pete is in his home town of Milwaukee, getting on a bus to head to New York City. Pete plays the saxohphone and is into jazz, so heads to New York in the hopes of making it big in jazz. You'd think he could do better performing around Wisconsin with a combo of his own, but some people get stars in their eyes. The movie spends several minutes on a montage of Curtis heading east on the Greyhound bus before finally arriving in New York City. And then when he gets off the bus, he's ridiculously naïve. First he walks to Times Square with all his luggage in hand, and then heads to a hotel only to find that there's no way he can afford the daily rates there. So he inquires about rooming houses, which were still a thing in those days.

Cut to the other main character in the story, Peggy Brown (Debbie Reynolds. She's one of the people who lives in the roooming house. And she seems well enough off that she's able to have her own phone, something in the old rooming house movies from before the war wouldn't have had. Except that she's not so well off, as a man from the phone company (Norman Fell) knocks on her door with the intention of disconnecting the phone for non-payment. Peggy convinces him to give her another two weeks to collect the bill, with the implication being that the repairman thinks he's going to get "something" in return. Worse, Peggy hasn't been able to pay her rent, so the owner of the house is about to throw her out.

It's to this house that Pete shows up, and since the owner is evicting Peggy, there's a free room to let, one which Pete is immediately able to take. But as I said a few paragraphs above, he's impossibly credulous for a newcomer to the city, even by the standards of Hollywood movies that have dumb yokels making their way to New York. He hears Peggy's sob story and lets her stay, which I'd have though would be a serious violation of the Production Code. Worse, Peggy doesn't let on about her full story.

Peggy is a taxi dancer working at the dance hall run by Nellie Miller (Don Rickles, really cast against type here), and she's already asked Nellie for quite a few advances on her income. He's to the point where he's about to expect something more in return for all the money he's lent Peggy that she'll never be able to pay back. And she's about to ask Nellie for even more money.

Pete is so stupid that he gets caught out by a scam involving some musicians about to form a combo, only for them to ask him to go out and get beers for everybody. He goes out, and they take the opportunity to run off with his valuable musical instruments. He thinks he can just go to the police and of course they'll solve the case lickety-split, but Peggy, having been in New York for five years, knows much better. She turns to Nellie for the money to buy Pete new instruments, with serious consequences.

I can understand why the stars of The Rat Race would have wanted to be involved, as everyone was known more for fairly light movies. (Admittedly, Curtis had done more serious drama up to this point like The Defiant Ones.) The material here seems like a good opportunity for all involved to show off serious acting chops. Don Rickles takes that chance, and is surprisingly good playing a part that's totally unexpected for him. Tony Curtis, however, isn't so good. I think, however, that's more down to the script, which gives him the thankless task of playing a person you just want to shake some sense into. The movie also feels stagy at times, which is in no small part because it is indeed based on a stage play.

Still, I think The Rat Race deserves a watch, in no small part because of that performance from Don Rickles.

Houdini

Today marks 97 years since the death of magician and escape artist Harry Houdini. His life story was loosely turned into a movie in the early 1950s with the unsurprising title Houdini. That movie is available on demand on Pluto TV, so I recently watched it since I figured Halloween was a suitable time to do a post on the movie.

Tony Curtis plays Harry Houdini (1874-1926), and as the movie opens he's working the carnival circuit as part of a show run by Schultz (Sig Ruman). Schultz doesn't necessarily care for Houdini's desire to do magic on stage, having hired him for other reasons. One evening at the show, in the audience is Bess Rahner (Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis' real-life wife at the time). Bess is infatuated with Harry, and keeps going to his shows, with him eventually getting her to realize that the two are in love, leading to an elopement, much to the chagrin of his mother (Angela Clark).

The two do traveling revues since Harry absolutely wants to make it as a magician, while Bess would be happy with him settling down and taking a normal job. After some abuse from a bunch of miners out west, Harry agrees, working in a lock and safe factory. But Harry still has the itch to do magic, so he takes his wife out to a gathering of the magicians' society for dinner. There, he goes up on stage to put on a strait-jacket, from which he's the only one to escape. His magic career is on its way.

Houdini's specialty becomes escape acts, escaping from handcuffs, locked boxes, submerged boxes, and a lot more. The career also takes him to Europe, where he hopes to meet a reclusive magician who supposedly learned the secret of dematerialization.

But them Mom dies, and Harry goes into a funk, not performing in public for years, wanting to make more contact with his mother. But Harry knows that the spiritualists who claim they can contact people on the other side are a bunch of fakes, so he decides he's going to debunk them publicly.

History tells us, however, that Houdini would die on Halloween in 1926. Houdini died from a ruptured appendix that wasn't diagnosed until too late, actually doing some shows with a high fever before dying in hospital. Not that this sort of death would be cinematic, however. So the movie portrays his death in a slightly different way....

Unsurprisingly, as with other Hollywood biopics of the era, this isn't the only liberty the movie takes with the truth. Despite the inaccuracies, Houdini is certainly an entertaining enough movie. Tony Curtis is a natural as Houdini, and Janet Leigh is appealing enough as his wife. The movie is also photographed in lovely Technicolor. In short, Houdini is good old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.

Decades before Frank Abegnale

Several weeks back TCM had an evening of movies dedicated to Tony Curtis, which included a movie I hadn't heard of before, The Great Impostor. The plot sounded interesting, so I decided to watch it while it was still on the Watch TCM app.

The movie is based loosely on the life of Ferdinand Demara, a real life impostor who eventually got caught out in the early 1950s, went to prison for it, and sold his life story, since in those days there weren't really yet laws about not being able to profit from telling the story of your criminal activities. In the late 1950s a book was written about Demara's story, and with the popularity of that book came a movie. Tony Curtis plays Demara, and at the start of the movie it's the early 1950s. He's been working at a school on an island off the New England coast, and seems to be a fairly popular teacher too. But his past is catching up to him again as the authorities come for him. This causes him to reflect on that past....

During the Depression, Ferdinand had been the son of a small-town movie theater owner (Gary Merrill) who unfortunately lost the theater because of the financial situation. Young Ferdinand drops out of school to try to earn money to help the family, and eventually leaves the family to join the military. Ferdinand is quite bright, and would be a natural of Officers' Candidate School, but there's one catch: you have to be a high-school graduate to apply to OCS. The GED wouldn't be developed until World War II, so Ferdinand doesn't have any way to go back and get that diploma or certificiate to enable him to become an officer.

To get around that little problem, he takes on somebody else's identity, until he learns that the military also does background checks of would-be OCS members. Now that he knows he's going to be caught, Ferdinand decides to fake his own suicide and get out of the military, instead joining a monastery with the intent of becoming a Trappist monk. Their vow of silence will also keep the authorities from finding him for quite some time.

Unfortunately, the abbot who is the head monk at the monastery determines that Ferdinand doesn't really have what it takes to be a Trappist monk, so it's back into the real world for Ferdinand, meaning that his crimes will be discovered. However, he uses prison as an opportunity to learn how to become an assistant warden, with some help from a little more identity theft. Of course, he'll eventually get noticed again, leading to the final act as a naval surgeon in Canada during World War II.

If you can get past the idea that the timeline seems all wrong here and the questions of how he was able to evade detection for so long over and over again, there isn't a bad little movie in The Great impostor. Unsurprisingly, the sort of smooth operator role that Curtis had recently played in Operation Petticoat and Some Like It Hot comes naturally, and works well for The Great Impostor. The movie is also aided by a couple of pretty good supporting performances courtesy of Edmond O'Brien, Raymond Massey, and Karl Malden.

The Great Impostor seems to be free with ads on the Roku Channel for now. It's definitely worth a watch.

Spartacus

I've got a box set of Kirk Douglas movies that has Spartacus in it. I'd been a bit reluctant to sit down and devote a good 196 minutes to the movie, sort of the same issue I had with Cleopatra a few weeks back. But Spartacus is going to be on TCM tomorrow (Mar. 12) at 4:30 PM, so I recently fired up the DVD player and finally watched Spartacus.

Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is a slave of Thracian (roughly modern-day northern Greece) origin who at the start of the movie in the 70s BC is working in a mine in Libya, where the slave-masters drive everyone hard until they mostly die a fairly early death. Spartacus is unsurprisingly truclent about it, but there's not much way to resist when you're a slave. He's about to have a bit of luck, if you can call it that, in the form of slave trader Batiatus (Peter Ustinov). He looks at several of the slaves, and buys Spartacus.

However, it turns out that Batiatus runs a training school for gladiatorial combat, and intends to put Spartacus into combat with all the other slaves there, another occupation that has a fairly limited lifespan, since combat is generally to the death. But Spartacus is able to become romantically invoved with one of the females cooking and feeding the slaves, Varinia (Jean Simmons), to the point that she's going to become pregnant with his child. But the two of them are split up when Roman Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) buys Varinia. And after Crassus wants to see some combat, Spartacus decides to revolt.

They're able to break out of the training school, but if you think about it, it's not going to be easy to evade detection in Italy. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go north to Gaul, but that's a pretty long journey. Instead, Spartacus contracts with a group of pirates represented by Tigranes (Herbert Lom) to take the ever-increasing group of rebel ex-slaves by boat over to the Balkans, requiring them to head down to Brindisi in the heel of Italy.

The Romans, of course, are up in arms about what's going on, and politics intrudes on what the best course of action should be. Pompey has been fighting a war in Hispania and is brought back to pursue Spartacus' army from the direction of Sicily, while another legion will attack from Brindisi. This will force Spartacus to head back north toward Rome, where Crassus has his own troops, and political reasons for driving Spartacus toward his troops.

In the meantime, there's been quite a bit of political maneuvering going on in the Roman Senate. Crassus, as we have seen, has tried to grab power for himself by becoming the hero in putting down Spartacus' revolt. Gracchus (Charles Laughton), patriarch in an old patrician family, is horrified at this, as he sees this as the first step toward tyranny. (Of course, he was ultimately right, as it would be less than 50 years until Rome became an empire.) A young Julius Caesar (John Gavin) ultimately takes Crassus' side, which I suppose was instrumental in Caesar's eventual rise to power.

The Romans also don't get to live happily ever after. Crassus loses Varinia, who runs away and joins Spartacus' army, and Gracchus is declared an enemy of the state by Crassus because Gracchus is the one person who could still challenge Crassus' power. Crassus also loses his manservant, Antonius (Tony Curtis), a slave who runs off after coming to believe he's going to be made a sex-slave.

The life of Spartacus is the sort of material that would probably work well in a miniseries, assuming that you want to cover the political situation that affects how the Romans handle the rebellion. At 196 minuts, this movie version of Spartacus is a little long, mostly because the final battle in which Spartacus is defeated but not killed comes with a good 40 minutes left in the movie. There's a lot of political ends between Crassus and Gracchus that the writers want to clean up, and a Hollywood scene at the end that's supposed to leave the viewer hopeful.

The version of Spartacus in the box set I have is the 2015 restoration which, if I had a good enough home theater to watch it, would probably look pretty darn good, although not as good as the Blu-ray release.

The Brooklyn Cossack

Another of the movies I watched off my DVR recently is the 1962 version of the Nikolai Gogol novel Taras Bulba.

Yul Brynner plays Taras Bulba, leader of a band of Cossacks in the late 16th century. The part of the world inhabited by the Cossacks is stuck between three powerful nations: the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Poland. The various Coascak bands fight a lot; at the same time, there's also fighting with the Ottomans going on. In this case, it's a battle between Poland and the Ottomans, and the Cossack intervention on the side of the Poles saves the day. However, the Poles are duplicitous and take over the Cossack lands. Taras flees into the hills to escape the Polish yoke. (I thought this might be the Carpathians, which extend into Western Ukraine, although supposedly it's supposed to be the steppes even those are relatively flat.)

Taras and his wife have two children. They grow up to be the adults Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Ostap (Perry Lopez). Taras wants them to get a good education, so he sends them off to university in Kyiv, which is accepting Cossack students but is under Polish governance. The Poles don't particularly like the Cossacks, and treat Andrei and Ostap like dirt, subjecting them to disciplinary floggings and the like.

Worse for the brothers is that Andrei sees the lovely young woman Natalia (Christine Kaufmann). In and of itself, that wouldn't be such a big deal. But Natalia is a Polish princess. There's both class and nationality issues regarding any sort of relationship between her and a Cossack like Andrei, and if the the relationship became public, it would mean big trouble for Andrei. Unsurprisingly, the authorities do find out, and Andrei and Ostap have to beat a hasty retreat out of Kyiv and back to the old family home.

Dad is glad to see them, but in the mean time, the Cossacks have become relatively peaceful; indeed, we get to see them have a couple of celebrations. But the possibility of more fighting comes with the Poles asking the Cossacks to help them subdue the Baltics in exchange for the spoils of war. The Cossacks do go off and fight, but Taras has a trick up his sleeve. He's planning to turn on the Poles and take back the land the Poles stole from them all those years ago.

At the battle of Dubno, Taras puts his plan in motion, and is able to force the Poles to retreat inside the city walls where Taras can besiege them into surrendering. The fact that there's also a plague going through Dubno should only help the Cossacks, even though some of the people under Taras are not pleased with having to keep up a siege instead of fighting. And then it turns out that Natalia is in the city....

I have not actually read Gogol's original novel so I can only trust other reviewers who comment on how faithfully the movie follows the source material. In that light, I obviously can't make any complaints about the movie going off in its own direction. As a period action movie, it's not bad, although it certainly does have some problems. One is that it's too long, at just over two hours, and another is the casting of Curtis and Lopez as the two sons; both of them stick out like sore thumbs.

Yul Brynner, on the other hand, was born to play material like this, and does a fine job. There's also nice scenery. As I was watching, I was wondering whether this was another of those international co-productions that got made someplace like Yugoslavia which at the time was the most open of the Communist countries. When I looked it up, I discovered that filming was actually in Argentina. I guess the Pampas could easily substitute for the steppes.

All in all, Taras Bulba is not a bad movie to watch on a rainy day if you want action and something that's not overly demanding.

Sex and the Single Girl

Tomorrow in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, we get a day of the movies of Natalie Wood. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before is Sex and the Single Girl. It comes on tomorrow at 11:30 AM, and since I recorded it the last time it was on, I decided to watch it to do a post on it for the upcoming showing.

Tony Curtis gets nominal top billing as Bob Weston. Bob is the managing editor of Stop magazine, a magazine that at one point in the distant past had been a serious analysis magazine, but at some point in a desperate attempt to boost circulation, turned to writing much more salacious articles. One of those articles was about young psychologist/sexologist Helen Brown (Natalie Wood), who wrote a best-selling book called Sex and the Single Girl about how a single girl can in fact have it all.

Brown and her colleagues at the institute were of course aghast at that article, but Weston thinks it didn't go far enough. In fact, he believes that Brown has no real sexual experience at all, at least not of the sort she wrote about, and he's going to set about proving it for an article for Stop. Of course, there's an obvious problem in that there's no way Brown is ever going to consent to doing an interview with the good people at Stop, so Bob is going to have to come up with some way to get that interview.

As for Bob's personal life, he lives in an aparment next to Frank Broderick (Henry Fonda) and Frank's wife Sylvia (Lauren Bacall). Frank markets high-class women's hosiery, and although he's devoted to Sylvia, he's convinced that she believes Frank is interested in every woman he sees when in fact he's only got a professional interest in what sort of stocking are on these women's legs. It's the source for a lot of bickering.

And this gives Bob an idea. He'll go see Dr. Brown pretending to be Frank, and telling Brown Frank's problems with Sylvia. This, somehow, will trip Brown up and give Bob the material he needs for his story. In fact, Brown seems to be incredibly handsy with Bob, much more than I would imagine most psychologists being. She concludes, based on Bob-as-Frank's descriptions, that Sylvia is the problem. She'd like to meet Sylvia, something which Bob doesn't want because that will give the game away.

Eventually Brown does something I'd think is a severe violation of professional ethics and approaches Sylvia herself. Bob tries to get his girlfriend to pass herself off as Sylvia, and his secretary joins in, leading to three "Sylvias" which further perplexes Brown. And if that's a bad violation of ethics, Bob is falling in love with Helen, while Helen has feelings for Bob she doesn't want to explore for the obvious ethical reasons.

Sex and the Single Girl is a farce that takes its name from the book by Helen Gurley Brown, but as far as I'm aware Wood's character is nothing like the real-life Brown was and the movie is nothing like the book, Warner Bros. only using the title because they thought it would sell tickets.

There's a lot in Sex and the Single Girl that people will enjoy, but I have to admit that there's a fair amount that I had a problem with. I've mentioned the lack of professional ethics that Wood's Helen Brown has; this is all played for laughs and I can't imagine her colleagues at the institute being very accepting of what she's doing. Tony Curtis' Bob is another of his schmoozy schemers, a sort of character that I can find deeply unlikeable when it doesn't work; here, there are times that I didn't like it at all. The finale, which involved a madcap car chase, also didn't work for me.

But again, I think this is material that will appeal to some people, especially if you're interested in how the mid-1960s saw themselves. The movie, having been released by Warner Bros., is unsurpisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

TCM Star of the Month July 2020: Tony Curtis

We're into the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM, that being Tony Curtis. TCM is running Curtis' movies every Monday in prime time, with a surprisingly low number of his movies, just 17. The movies are grouped somewhat by theme, with his early movies tonight, two nights of comedies (July 13 and 27), and one of dramas (July 20).



A movie which surprised me in its absence is Operation Petticoat, since it's one that Curtis talks about in the Star of the Month piece he did for Cary Grant many years back. But then I looked it up and it turns out the movie was made at Universal; for some reason I was thinking it was an MGM movie which would be easier for TCM to get.



Curtis got an Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones, which is on tonight at 10:00 PM and is somewhat surprisingly not the first movie in the salute, that honor going to the Trapeze.



I was fortunate to have a pair of related pictures to use since The Defiant Ones is followed at 11:45 PM by The Vikings, which isn't all that good but is a fun movie to watch.

It's not surprising that the first of the comedies on July 13 would be Some Like It Hot, since it's one of the great movies ever made, with Tony Curtis being fun as the guy who gets poor Jack Lemmon into the crazy scheme of dressing as women to get away from a bunch of mobsters they witnessed committing a mob hit. Of course, Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon are the ones to get the memorable finale.



One other omission is Sweet Smell of Success, another movie for which Curtis would have been a worthy Oscar nominee. Curtis only got the one nomination for The Defiant Ones as mentioned above, but it's not the only role for which he probably should have gotten one. There's also The Boston Strangler, which is on the schedule, at 1:30 AM on July 21 (which is of course still July 20 on the west coast).

Goodbye Charlie

One of the movies in the current FXM rotation that I haven't blogged about before is Goodbye Charlie. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 11:15 AM and again at 7:45 AM Friday.

The movie starts off with Charlie, who isn't really seen as he's partying with a bunch of other people on the yacht of wealthy movie producer Sir Leopold Sartori (Walter Matthau). Eventually, Charles goes into Mrs. Sartori's cabin and starts putting the moves on her, leading Sir Leopold to go below decks and shoot Charlie, who falls out the porthole into the ocean, obviously dying in the process although since he's lost at sea his body isn't found.

George Tracy (Tony Curtis) was one of Charlie's best friends, and is now living in France as a writer. However, Charlie had named George as the executor of his will, and Charlie's manager Morton (Martin Gabel) wants George to speak at the memorial service, so George comes from nine time zones away to fulfill his solemn duty. Unfortunately, George was also one of Charlie's only friends, as there's only him and two women at the memorial service. Charlie, you see, was a real smooth operator who used and dumped women like tissue paper.

George is going to be in the Los Angeles area for some time settling the estate, which is a mess since Charlie was effectively broke, but George is able to live in Charlie's beach house. That night, after the memorial service, a man comes knocking with an obvious emergency. Bruce Minton (Pat Boone) is a wealthy heir living in another beach house up the coast, and as he was driving to see his mother he ran across a naked and incoherent woman. The most Bruce could make out is that the woman wanted to be dropped off at Charlie's house; presumably she was one of Charlie's many ex-girlfriends.

Except that she regains her identity overnight, and realizes she's not in fact one of Charlie's ex-girlfriends, but Charlie himself, reincarnated as a woman (played by Debbie Reynolds). Charlie is none too pleased at first, knowing how he treated women, and George doesn't believe it anyway until Charlie tells George too many personal things that only Charlie could have known. And eventually, Charlie, if he's not exactly comfortable being a woman, at least figures he can put his womanly body to good use, what with those breasts and sex appeal.

Although Charlie has been reincarnated as a woman, he obviously hasn't learned anything from the whole experience of getting shot, as his plans are to use the womanly form to get close to men and blackmail them, having Charlie's knowledge of everything he did to women. Charlie does need money, after all, even if this isn't a particularly honest way of going about getting it.

Complications arise, however, when Bruce shows up again, having been captivated by this woman that he doesn't realize is actually a former man. Bruce could even marry the new Charlie, and while Charlie might like Bruce's money, he still doesn't want to be a wife till death does them part. There's also Sartori and the question of what will happen to Charlie if Sartori ever learns the truth or the new Charlie releases any information about Sartori.

Goodbye Charlie is a movie with a very funny premise, but one with doesn't quite live up to the potential of its premise. I think the problem is that both of the leads are miscast. In a movie without a gender-bender premise, it would be Tony Curtis who's the unctuous manipulator, not the Reynolds character. Curtis doesn't work so well as the straight man to such an operator. Reynolds, for her part, is entirely the wrong actress to be playing manipulative; I'm not certain who had both the comic chops and the reputation to pull it off at that point in the 1960s. Goodbye Charlie also goes on too long at just a shade under two hours.

As always, however, it's the sort of movie where you may want to watch and judge for yourself. In addition to the upcoming FXM showings, it's available on DVD if you want to watch it that way.

The List of Adrian Messenger

When I was making my last set of DVD purchases, I noticed that the Kirk Douglas Centennial Collection had quite a few movies that I haven't blogged about before. Recently, I sat down to watch The List of Adrian Messenger (also available as a standalone DVD) off of it.

The movie starts off promisingly, with a man going into a bank building one evening after hours, when there's only an executive working late on the upper floors. The man sabotages the elevator so that when the executive gets into it, the elevator plunges nine floors, killing him. The mystery man crosses a name off a list, leaving only one: Adrian Messenger.

Messenger (John Merivale) is a writer of several books who is now writing about his experience in World War II. He too has a list of names, presumably people he wanted to interview, only to find out that a whole bunch of them have died accidental deaths over the past several years. Messenger's friend Gethryn (George C. Scott) worked for MI5, so could Gethryn investigate informally?

It's a good thing Messenger asked Gethryn for help, because he's about to go to Canada to do his own investigation, while the man who sabotaged the elevator knows about this. He poses as a vicar and puts a suitcase full of explosives aboard the plane, before going into a bathroom and removing his disguise, revealing that our murderer is played by Kirk Douglas. (This is more of a suspense movie than a mystery.

Gethryn continues to investigate with the help of Frenchman Le Borg (Jacques Roux), who had worked with Gethryn in the war and who was the one survivor on the plane with Messenger. Eventually, the roads lead to a wealthy family out in the English countryside, with the only heir being a young boy. Aha! As with Kind Hearts and Coronets, Kirk Douglas' character must be killing off heirs to a noble title. Not so fast.

The plot of The List of Adrian Messenger is reasonably interesting, but the movie also has a huge problem. If you watch the opening credits, you'll notice some big stars: Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, and Tony Curtis in addition to those whom I've already mentioned. (Dana Wynter and Herbert Marshall are among the supporting roles). And yet, those big names don't seem to show up. That's because the movie was made with a gimmick of putting these big starts under the same sort of heavy disguise that Kirk Douglas' character is under. After the end of the main action of the movie, there's a coda revealing which star had which cameo as they remove their masks Scooby Doo-style. I found it all distracting, not helped by the fact that apparently at least one of the stars only appeared for the unmasking at the end. (In Douglas' case, the makeup was necessary since his character was supposed to be in disguises so as not to be recognized by the people he's killing.) Also, some of the voices are dubbed.

The List of Adrian Messenger isn't a bad movie, but I think it could have been a lot better.

Kings Go Forth

One of my recent DVD purchases was a cheap Frank Sinatra box set, which included the movie Kings Go Forth.

Sinatra plays Lt. Sam Loggins, who is serving in the US Army late in World War II in one of the lesser-mentioned campaigns of that war, that being the one in southern France. The French Riviera has already been liberated, as the soldiers are able to go there when they get passes, but the front isn't too far away since the soldiers have to be able to drive back and forth between the front and the coast. As for the war itself, Loggins' forward unit is in need of a new radio man, and among the new soldier arrivals, Cpl. Britt Harris (Tony Curtis) announces that he knows how to operate a field radio.

Harris has a past back in the States, which is that he was a spoiled rich boy who didn't have to do real work, and wound up with no real character, which is why he decided to join the enlisted ranks instead of the officers' corps: he's trying to run away from that past and somehow make things right. But that past also causes some friction with Lt. Sam.

When Sam goes to the coast on one of his passes, he meets a nice young woman Monique (Natalie Wood) who seems to be teaching a boy English. He's surprised that she can speak English, so they strike up a conversation and have dinner together. Sam is obviously smitten with Monique, but Monique is kind of guarded about pursuing a relationship. So when Sam says she's welcome to meet him next week, He winds up being met by Monique's mother (Leora Dana). She takes him back to their palatial home, where he learns about their past, which is that Monique's mom was born in America. Eventually, though, Monique reveals a secret, which is that both of her parents were born in America and that her now-deceased father was black, which of course makes Monique mixed-race, although she looks even less mixed-race than Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life. This is supposedly why she and Sam can never have a real relationship.

Not that Britt cares. He runs into Sam and Monique one night at a jazz club, and he too is taken with Monique's beauty and, once Sam is out of the picture, he starts putting the moves on her. However, Britt having been spoiled rotten back in the States, decides that he can never marry her, although not because of her mixed-race heritage since he's broken off engagements to a whole bunch of monoracial white women back in the States. Sam, and especially Monique, react predictably very badly to Britt's selfishness.

There's still a war on, though, and the Germans haven't been dislodged, so a mission is going to have to go behind enemy lines to get a better fix on their position. As you can guess, it's Sam and Britt who get selected for the mission, even though the two of them are at each other's throats over Monique. Can they resolve their differences, and can Britt finally redeem himself?

Kings Go Forth is a movie that I found a bit of a mess, thanks mostly to a script that doesn't quite know what it wants to do. If Monique's mom could love a black man, there's no logical reason why Sam couldn't love a mixed-race woman; it's also not as if he's going back to the South after the war. And when the revelation is made about Monique's father, her mom consistently refers to him as her husband, and not by his first name, which really struck me. The ending is forced and, again, something that for me strained credulity. All three of the leads try hard, and Curtis probably comes out best, but they're all hamstrung by the script.

Still, you should always judge for yourself. Some of you may enjoy Kings Go Forth more than I did, and the box set isn't terribly expensive for the number of movies you're getting.

The Manitou

One of the movies in this week's installment of TCM Underground is The Manitou, running overnight tonight at 2:00 AM (still 11:00 PM this evening out on the west coast).

Tony Curtis plays Harry Erskine, a psychic in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Psychics are, of course, phony, and Harry has taken the flamboyant phoniness to new levels, reminiscent of his scheming in movies like Some Like It Hot or Operation Petticoat. Things change, however, when his ex-girlfriend Karen (Susan Strasberg) comes back into his life one day. She's got a small lump on her shoulder that she's worried about. To be fair, it's perfecly normal to be worried about a lump like that since there's always the possibility of a cancerous tumor. But what Karen doesn't know is that she's really in for it with this lump.

Harry takes Karen to the hospital, where the doctors run some tests on her that give them the distinct impression that this lump resembles a fetus, which is of course preposterous since it's on her shoulder, and not in her uterus, which is where a fetus is supposed to be. Since this lump is clearly dangerous, the doctors plan to operate and remove the lump, which is an eminently sensible move. At least, it's sensible until they actually perform the operation and something physically repels the doctors from cutting into that lump. It's as though the lump has a life of its own beyond what a fetus would be.

So Harry does some research, and eventually finds out from a retired professor of Native American history (Burgess Meredith) that this lump might actually be a "manitou". Apparently, every living thing (and every non-living thing, as we'll find out in a later scene) has a spirit called a "manitou", and this one is a reincarnation of a manitou from several hundred years ago. Not only that, but if it finishes going through its gestation period (for lack of a better phrase) all hell is going to break loose, because this manitou is a particularly evil one. The only hope our poor San Franciscans have is to find a Native American medicine man who knows how to fight a manitou and defeat it.

Thankfully, there is one of those medicine men around northern California, one John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara). He doesn't really like white people because of the way they treated his ancestors, but he ultimately decides reluctantly to fight this manitou because he knows what the consequences are if nobody fights it. So he accompanies the white people back to San Francisco and the hospital, where all hell does break loose in the final climactic battle in the hospital, although it is at least localized to the hospital.

The Manitou is ludicrous even beyond the point of many movies that I've argued strain credulity to the breaking point. It's also not helped that the movie has 1970s special effects. This is a film that needed either to go the Val Lewton route and leave some of the stuff that would have required "modern" special effects to be left to the imagination and only show the things they could have done 30 years earlier, or else benefit from the CGI that was not yet available. That having been said, there's so much about The Manitou that's so unintentionally funny that the movie winds up being entertaining. Tony Curtis is way over the top; Ann Sothern in a small role gets thrown down a flight of stairs to her death; all of the scenes of the manitou fighting back, not just the final battle, are a hoot; and Susan Strasberg is given an unenviable task in that final battle, although you'll have to watch it for yourself.

The Manitou is one of those movies that did get a DVD release at some point in the past, but is now out of print, so you'll have to catch the TCM showing.

A later Fox docudrama

Fox did a lot of docudramas back in the 1940s, many of which I've already recommended, starting with one of the earliest, The House on 92nd Street. This time, however, I'm going to recommend a docudrama from the 1960s: The Boston Strangler, airing at 6:00 PM ET tonight on the Fox Movie Channel.

The "Boston Strangler" is a movie about the real-life serial killer Albert DeSalvo, who terrorized the Boston area in the early 1960s by worming his way into women's apartments and killing ten or so of them. (They of course didn't have DNA evidence back then to make things a bit easier for them.) Police know they have a serial killer on their hands, but lead investigator Detective DiNatale (George Kennedy) is at a loss. The public is clamoring for something to be done, which is unsurprising since I don't think any of us wants to see a serial killer on the loose. To deal with the political pressure, then state Attorney General Edward Brooke (who would go on to become a US Senator) orders underling John Bottomly (Henry Fonda), who'd rather be doing eminent domain law, to help on the Boston Strangler case.

Now, this being a docudrams, we already know from the facts how the case unravels. One of the would be murder victims fights back, surviving the attack and injuring one Albert De Salvo in the process; this enables the police to crack the case. What we're looking for in a movie like The Boston Strangler is how we get there. That's pretty interesting and takes up the first half of the movie. An interesting technique is used: multiple split-screens showing either things going on in two different places at the same time, or the same scene from two different angles. It takes some getting used to, but it actually works fairly well. It probably worked better in an actual movie theater, where the much larger screen mean that scenes with several splits means the various pieces won't be impossibly tiny. This isn't a movie to watch on a smaller TV, to be honest.

The way the story is told also means that we don't even see Albert DeSalvo until about an hour into the movie. He's played by Tony Curtis, and the second half of the movie is his. The movie takes the view that DeSalvo was seriously mentally ill, suffering from multiple personality disorder in which one of the personalities was the killer. As such, much of the second half of the film is set in a mental hospital where DeSalvo is being evaluated by Bottomly and others while it can be determined whether he's fit to stand trial. Curtis is excellent as the tormented man who to people around him seemed like a normal family man. (You'd think they'd have noticed it if he had a split personality.) There's not much here resembling Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, and certainly not Polly Bergen in The Caretakers.

That having been said, The Boston Strangler is a movie of questionable accuracy. In real life, DeSalvo wasn't thought to have multiple personality disorder. Futhermore, there are now doubts about whether DeSalvo was actually the Boston Strangler. To be fair to the movie, though, you can still have a good movie that isn't quite honest with the truth, and The Boston Strangler certainly fills the bill in that regard. Clearly, it's not a family picture, and it's not one you can sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch, either.

Tony Curtis: The Defiant Ones

If The Vikings doesn't engage in any social consciousness raising, our next Tony Curtis selection certainly does: The Defiant Ones, airing at 9:45 PM ET tonight.

Tony Curtis plays prisoner John Jackson, who is being transported back to jail with the rest of the chain gang. A storm hits, and the prison truck gets in an accident, turning over; this gives Jackon the chance to escape. There's only one problem: he's handcuffed to fellow prisoner Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier), so the two will eithe rhave to escape together, or not at all.

On second thought, that is by no means the only problem. Jackson, if you couldn't tell from the picture above, is white, while Cullen is black. And, this being a Hollywood movie, you just know that there's going to be a whole bunch of racial tension: the white guy is going to be a vicious racist, and the black guy is going to have all sort of (fully logical) justification for not wanting to trust the white guy shackled to him. For example, while trying to escape, Jackson has trouble fording a swift river, and is threatened with being carried away by the current. Cullen pulls him out. Not so much out of any feelings for Jackson, but because if he didn't pull Jackson out, he too would be pulled in.

And so it goes, with the two men looking for a way to break the chain that literally binds them, while trying to keep ahead of sheriff Theodore Bikel and police captain Charles McGraw. Eventually, they wind up at the isolated farmhouse of widowed Cara Williams. Jackson falls in love with her, and this gives the two of them a chance to escape without Cullen: he from the law, she from her miserable existence. Cullen, meanwhile, would be left to try to find the freight train north himself. But, it might not be what it seems....

The Defiant Ones is certainly formulaic in that, once you know you've got a white racist handcuffed to a black guy, you know how the sparks are going to fly over the rest of the movie. That doesn't mean the movie isn't good, however, as Poitier and Curtis both give excellent performances. Even though we know where the story is going to wind up, the journey there is still interesting.

Tony Curtis: The Vikings

Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in the climactic fight scene of The Vikings (1958)

I listed the various Tony Curtis movies that will be airing tomorrow as part of TCM's 24-hour long salute to him. Some of them at least deserve a fuller-length blog posting. First up is The Vikings, which will be airing at 9:45 AM ET.

The movie starts off a couple of decades before the main action. The Vikings raid Northumbria, one of the kingdoms on the island of Britain, killing the king. The Viking leader Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine) rapes the Northumbrian queen, knocking her up in the process. Fast forward to the main action of the movie. Ragnar is still ruling, now alongside adult son Einar (Kirk Douglas). Meanwhile, there's Eric (Tony Curtis), a slave who was kidnapped from Britain as an infant. What neither of them knows is that he's the child of the old Northumbrian queen, which makes him and Einar half-brothers. Not that this blood relationship would help, as Eric blinded Einar in one eye with one of Einar's falcons.

Meanwhile, the Vikings have also captured the lovely Welsh girl Morgana (Janet Leigh), who was the betrothed to the new Northumbrian king. She's now in the Viking lands, where Einar intends to marry her. Eric, however, sees the presence of Morgana as a way out of the Viking lands and back to Britain, where he feels he really belongs. Besides, his life is in danger amongst the Vikings if anybody learns his true identity. Eric and Morgana flee, with Einar in hot pursuit, until everybody ends up at the Northumbrian castle for the final battle scene....

One has to wonder just what all the actors were thinking when they decided to take this one on. The dialogue is horrid, the plot is kind of silly, and the costumes -- well, I'm sure the women will like those tunics that show most of a man's arms and legs. Perhaps Curtis and Douglas thought they were still sex symbols. To be fair, though, it's not a terrible picture; it's just silly and dumb, although without being an insult to our intelligence. In short, it's a movie for entertaining, and not one with much of anything to say about the human condition; or, the perfect movie to watch with your friends and a giant bowl of popcorn.

Amazon lists The Vikings as being fairly cheaply available on DVD, so you can set up that night with your friends and the popcorn whenever you want.

Gregory Peck, military man

TCM's salute to Star of the Month Gregory Peck contines this evening with several movies in which Peck plays a member of the military. Among these is Captain Newman, M.D., at 10:00 PM ET.

Peck plays the title character, an Army psychiatrist at a medical base in Arizona during World War II. Newman's running the place, and his job is to put the soldiers back together mentally so that they can return to combat duty, preferably immediately if not sooner. Of course, there's a war on, making running the place a bit difficult, especially when you consider that many of the higher ups think you should just tough it out -- the views on combat fatigue weren't what they are today. Helping Capt. Newman fight the bureaucracy is Corporal Jake Leibowitz (Tony Curtis), a man who isn't that much different from Tony Curtis' character in Operation Petticoat; namely that of a schemer who uses skills of dubious legality to get things done. Among the nurses are Angie Dickinson and Jane Withers.

Captain Newman, M.D. is partly about the tribulations the staff faces from the military bureaucracy, from higher-ups who think they know better how to run the place than the doctors, to finding themselves with a bunch of Italian POWs on hand. But the patients are just as important. Among them are Eddie Albert, a colonel who's suffered a nervous breakdown; a catatonic Robert Duvall; and Bobby Darin, who is clearly suffering from what would now be called post traumatic stress disorder. He gives an almost harrowing portrayal when Captain Newman puts him under truth serum to reveal what it is that he's been repressing.

Captain Newman, M.D. walks a fine line between comedy and drama, and for the most part, does it pretty well. Gregory Peck wasn't a comic actor, but he's not really expected to be one here, either. Instead, he's the foil for all the antics of Tony Curtis' character, and Peck pulls off the part of poor put-upon Captain Newman well. Tony Curtis, on the other hand, was quite adept at comedy and, already having played a similar role, portrays Leibowitz with ease. The three main patients are all quite good, and the nurses are adequate, although not the most important part of the movie.

Apparently, Captain Newman, M.D. hasn't been released to DVD, and remains one of Peck's lesser-known movies. That's a shame, because it's really a pretty good movie.

"Epic" does not necessarily mean "good"

Sure, ever since movies like Heaven's Gate were huge bombs (and why did we even get Kevin Costner's Waterworld?), we've known that spending the entire budget of Lesotho on a movie doesn't guarantee it will be any good; nor does putting more stars in it than there were in Dinner at Eight (which, coincidentally, is airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM ET on TCM) automatically make for a classic. TCM is running three "comedy epics" tonight, and one of them clearly doesn't stand up today: The Great Race, overnight at 2:30 AM ET.

Tony Curtis plays the Great Leslie, a handsome and virtuous daredevil in th efirst decade of the 20th century who performs feats of danger that wow the ladies. He's got a rival, though, in the form of Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), who tries to sabotage all of Leslie's stunts. Leslie decides, in conjunction with one of the early automobile makers, that his next stunt should involve taking part in (and winning, of course) a car race from New York to Paris, via a transpacific crossing. Professor Fate learns about this, and immediately decides he has to enter the race, and ensure that nobody else can win.

The two rivals, however, are not alone. Maggie Dubois is a suffragette who, in trying to raise the status of women, insists on forcing the publisher of one of New York's newspapers (Arthur O'Connell) to give her a job as a correspondent. And what would be the perfect job? Going on the "great race" in a Stanley Steamer and reporting on the race. The publisher doesn't like the idea, but his wife (Vivian Vance, TV's Ethel Mertz in one of her rare movie roles) is rather warmer to the idea, so off goes Maggie. You know that the two male rivals are going to compete over her as well, although they've got a third rival, in the form of her ideals. As for the race, it sets off, with Leslie being a team with his longtime assistant Hezekiah (Keenan Wynn), and Prof. Fate having assistant Max (Peter Falk) accompanying him.

The problem with The Great Race is that the humor largely falls flat, if not inducing cringes. The movie all too slowly makes its way through the American west, followed by a trip across the Bering Strait on a melting iceberg, and eventually ends up in an unnamed eastern European principality in a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda. The Zenda sequence, in particular, goes on much too long, climaxing with a pie fight that's much more tedious than funny.

Still, some people may enjoy The Great Race, and Natalie Wood gets some nice period costumes to wear. (Although, how she could pack all those changes of clothes is a mystery.) For those are new to the "epic comedies", the first two are rather better:
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at 8:00 PM; followed by
Around the World in 80 Days at 11:15 PM.